Write Now with Scrivener, Episode no. 40: Wendy Van Camp, Speculative Fiction Writer and Poet

Show notes:

• Wendy van Camp
• The Planets
• SFWA - Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association
• The Curate’s Brother: A Jane Austen Variation of Persuasion
• NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)
• Stuart Horwitz: Blueprint Your Bestseller

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Wendy writes speculative poetry, which is “what we consider genre poetry. Just as there are science fiction and fantasy authors, and you would know what their genre is and what they write, poetry also has genre, it’s not always literary.”

Speculative poetry covers as broad a range of topics as novels and short stories. “You could be doing poems about vampires, you could be doing poems about dragons. Those are fantasy elements. Or you could be doing hard science fiction concepts to the same tropes that a science fiction or fantasy author would use for their novels.”

One subset of speculative poetry is ScFiKu, which is a form of haiku based on science fiction themes. “We incorporate technical words, we have science fiction, astronomy themes, things of that nature in our haiku poems.”

Wendy got into speculative poetry by chance, when, at a local science fiction convention, she wanted to get out of the sun, and decided to check out a poetry workshop. It turned out that she was the only student; the workshop leader said that all the other participants were “just friends of mine. They’re all editors of National Poetry magazines that have come to support me.” Wendy worked on a poem, read it out, and “one of these editors happened to be sitting close to me, leaned over and whispered into my ear, I loved your poem, I want to publish it, I’ll pay you. And that is the day I became a poet.”

Wendy isn’t just a poet; she has also written a Regency romance, The Curate’s Brother: A Jane Austen Variation of Persuasion. I asked her what the Regency was. “King George became mad, he was suffering from mental illness. And so his son had to take over, but because his son was not confirmed, he was called a regent for his father.”

The Regency period only lasted about ten years. “But it was a period of great change in English. The old aristocratic societies were falling to the wayside. And new people were coming up from the commoners to fill the ranks.” As to why this is such a popular period for romance novels, Wendy said, “I really credit Austen for that. She was a woman of that time period, and she was writing stories about the women that she knew and the plight of women of her time. It was like she was writing a contemporary romance before we even had a genre called romance. In a sense, she and a few others of her time developed the genre.”

Wendy has been using Scrivener since the beginning of her writing, having discovered the app during NaNoWriMo. She likes to type on an AlphaSmart Neo, a small electronic typewriter, and, “at the end of the day, I download whatever I’ve written for the day into Scrivener. Scrivener was a great way to organize my book while I was drafting it, and then when you’re editing, it’s very easy to move things around.” She uses a system of color-coding for scenes in the Binder. “I color-code each scene. So I color-code them either as good, or bad, so good is green, a rejected scene is red.” This helps her organize her work as she progresses in her drafts.

In addition to being an author, Wendy edits poetry anthologies, and uses Scrivener to manage those as well. She creates folders for each poet, files for each poem, and adds more information in notes in the Inspector, such as poets biographies and emails. “I just find nothing goes astray each anthology, and I’ve done eight now. It can be pretty busy managing an anthology as an editor, and I find Scrivener has become my go-to place to organize them.”